A Happy Tune: Auditorium 2 Is Going Ahead

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Last night Alec mentioned that Auditorium 2 was narrowly short of meeting its necessary Kickstarter funding to spring into existence. Well, the good news for them is that they made it, just. With 67 hours to go, they’ve sneaked over the $60,000 target, so it looks like the sequel to a well-loved indie project will be going ahead. It’s fair to say that Cipher Prime are quite pleased, reporting, “There are not enough exclamation points in the world for us to give to you.”

The new fad is to use Kickstarter to help with money or to get a cash infusion to help it along. They were almost there anyway. I would suspect they might have gotten someone to donate big anonymously at the end and returned the money, or donated to themselves to get the 45k they had already raised. Since with kickstarter, you lose all the money if you don’t make your minimum amount.

Cipher Prime dev here. Right before the bump started (Monday, when we were at ~41k), we discussed what our threshold would be for this sort of “self-funding.” We came up with $55,000 as the “close enough” number. If we were just $5k away from the target and an hour from failing, we would find a friend to spot us, and pay them back in the future. The $60k is a serious estimate based on business earnings to date and our development experience. But frankly, it would suck to lose everything after all the man-hours we’ve put into the Kickstarter to get close to the target; we could absorb the $5k hit and pray for better sales down the line.

Fortunately, with our final publicity push (mailing list hits, begging backers to raise their pledges, facebook/twitter campaigns, and of of course the huge stroke of luck in getting the high traffic from sites like RPS and Giant Bomb), this became unnecessary. However, we do stand at the ready if, in a few days, a whole bunch of large backers pull out. People do decrease and cancel pledges after Kickstarters get over their target. Hopefully that won’t be necessary if enough of a buffer builds up.

Oh, I was not saying it was anything “bad.” I am glad that it turned out all good for you, I was actually just stating that it is a viable way. I think if you get even 70% to your target, it is worth the technique. =) don’t take it as a downplay at all.